MEDIA; A Sideline That Competes With a Byline

By DAVID CARR

Published: July 24, 2006

OF all the journalists who wrote obits for the dot-com mania, few did it with the precision and quiet glee of Nina Munk, a former writer for Fortune. ''Fools Rush In,'' her brick-by-brick demolition of the ill-conceived AOL-Time Warner merger drew raves for its portrait of a company that got a little pixie dust in its eye and promptly lost its head.

It is worth noting that at the same time, Ms. Munk was taking on a tiny AOL of her own. Urbanhound.com was a tidy little enterprise designed to help dog owners and their furry friends make their way through the wilds of New York City. After years of putt-putting along while Ms. Monk had two children, wrote her book, did articles as a contract writer for Vanity Fair and other publications, including The New York Times, urbanhound.com is now expanding to San Francisco and Chicago.

Ms. Munk is a well-paid writer, a job she says that she loves and does not plan on leaving, but her entrepreneurial impulse seems more and more common. With the pages of their own newspapers and magazines full of articles about cutbacks, buyouts and consolidation, some reporters have stared down grim realities of the news business and decided that there may be opportunity amid all the mayhem.

Content may or may not be king, but it's mighty valuable. Journalists, who know a thing or two about its creation, are beginning to build sites that help them maintain custody of the content and, if all goes well, reap the rewards. Om Malik, a former writer for Business 2.0, has received backing for GigaOM.com, a technology news Web site that has broken a number of stories, and Rafat Ali, the former managing editor of The Silicon Alley Reporter, recently received funding for his company, which publishes PaidContent.org, a site that covers digital media news.

''A lot of journalists are going to have to rethink what they are doing if they are going to survive,'' said Mr. Ali. ''If you stand back and do nothing, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? The newspaper you are working at could go away and then you won't have a place to work.''

Ms. Munk has a pretty good gig, but her interest in urbanhound.com makes sense on many levels: she is a freak about both the Internet and her dog, Mack; has covered titans from Gerald Levin to Leonard Lauder; and is the daughter of Peter Munk, a well-known Canadian mining and real estate tycoon. And then there is the self-confidence, some might say arrogance, that drives a lot of reporters.

''A lot of business reporters have probably sat in an interview and thought that they were smarter than the person they were sitting across the table from,'' Ms. Munk said.

But she quickly found that being a gimlet-eyed business reporter did not qualify her to actually build a business. That takes more than smarts: it takes faith and a kind of optimism not usually found in a lot of newsrooms.

''I am a journalist, and I wanted to create a site that has credible information and reflects the integrity of what I do, and I am really proud of the content,'' she said. ''But I have the temperament of a reporter, which means that I am a skeptic, especially about any kind of hype.''

Urbanhound.com was conceived in 1999 and appeared in 2000, in the teeth of the digital implosion. Ms. Munk recalls that when she put together a business plan for urbanhound.com in 1999, she decided that she needed $50,000 to get started, a friend with start-up experience laughed in her face, telling her that she needed to come up with much bigger numbers, to give investors ''something to dream about.''

''Like a lot of business journalists, I am risk-averse,'' she said. ''If someone else besides me had the idea for urbanhound, it would probably be in 30 cities, not just now getting to 3 cities. I was not sufficiently ambitious.''

Part of what held the site back was Ms. Munk's allergy to selling ads.

''I think that the wall between editorial and advertising is deeply ingrained in most journalists,'' she said. ''There is an arrogance to it, a belief that we are somehow above all that.''

Ms. Munk's sister, Cheyne Munk Beys, who had worked in selling digital media, gave her a big lecture about the opportunity she was missing. Nina Munk took the advice to heart and asked her sister to come and sell ads for the site. The site recently sold a $35,000 national ad, a big number for an enterprise that has less than $250,000 invested, most of it from friends and family.

The leap that Ms. Munk took required faith, but the risk is less than for some. She comes from the kind of background -- her family has been successful in business to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars -- that did not require maxing out the credit cards just to get started. Ms. Munk said that while her father is one of the investors, the idea and the business needed to stand on its own.

The site that eventually popped out -- ''My first effort was pathetic and soooo Mickey Mouse,'' she said -- was built on a tribe of common interest, dog lovers, that meant that people who came to the site were immediately swapping stories about vets, dog runs and puppy behavior issues.

The Web has not always been kind to pet-oriented sites. Pets.com became a symbol of digital cluelessness in the dot-com boom with millions invested in a concept that was built on shipping massive bags of dog food purchased over the Internet. Ms. Munk said that at some point she would go beyond the friends and family who have served as backers and either sell the site or take on serious investors. She may not be much of a saleswoman, but she is convinced that urbanhound.com has enduring value.

''We have gone out of our way to focus on information and not focus on consumerism for your pets,'' she said. ''We are not the place to go to get a rhinestone collar for your dog.''

Ms. Munk, whose most recent article in Vanity Fair was about the real estate market in Greenwich, Conn., said that her Web business had informed her approach to reporting.

''I think for a business reporter, starting a business is humbling,'' she said. ''I think you develop a new appreciation for what it takes to manage a huge business. I have become acutely aware of the personality traits required for success in business.

''None of these guys have any doubts, and I am filled with self-doubt,'' she added. ''I've learned a lot about how single-minded you have to be.''